The Mote in God's Eye (1974) [+]
Jun 17 2024
The Mote in God's Eye is a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's set about a thousand years in the future after mankind has expanded into the stars, built a star-spanning empire, had that empire torn down into a long night, and is now being consolidated by a second human empire.
In the middle of this consolidation where the second empire is pitted against the outward systems there is a ship with aliens though due to mishap all the aliens are found dead. Still, this is the first alien contact in human history and they know where the aliens came from.
Two ships are sent to establish first contact. The Battlecruiser MacArthur is commanded by Captain Roderick Blaine and has a team of civilian scientists and experts on board. The Battleship Lenin is there to be a silent witness, isolated to avoid any contamination, and prepared to destroy MacArthur to keep its tech secret from the aliens.
The aliens are Moties. Very class based in that different Motie classes are physically quite different and some interbreeding is possible. The Moties seem quite peaceful and agreeable and although a lower tech level have an amazing grasp of learning things and building/modifying tech on the fly at a speed that is impossible for humans. And they have a huge secret that if revealed would make humans see them as a mortal danger to humanity...
The storytelling is excellent. The first part introduces our main human characters. The Moties are alien and mysterious and you rarely get to read their thoughts and inner workings -- it's a story mostly from the human POV.
I liked this story as it is "shiny space ships with a big mystery". As the story gets to the climax the questions is whether or not human and motie can live peacefully together or if it will be war (and really with humanity having a temporary tech advantage the question is more to commit genocide or not).
Overall a gripping classic science fiction story. There was eventually a sequel, The Gripping Hand (1993), though it did not review well so I'll probably skip it. Even though The Mote in God's Eye is set in the CoDominium universe with other novels, it is very standalone and I had no trouble reading it without reading other novels.
In the middle of this consolidation where the second empire is pitted against the outward systems there is a ship with aliens though due to mishap all the aliens are found dead. Still, this is the first alien contact in human history and they know where the aliens came from.
Two ships are sent to establish first contact. The Battlecruiser MacArthur is commanded by Captain Roderick Blaine and has a team of civilian scientists and experts on board. The Battleship Lenin is there to be a silent witness, isolated to avoid any contamination, and prepared to destroy MacArthur to keep its tech secret from the aliens.
The aliens are Moties. Very class based in that different Motie classes are physically quite different and some interbreeding is possible. The Moties seem quite peaceful and agreeable and although a lower tech level have an amazing grasp of learning things and building/modifying tech on the fly at a speed that is impossible for humans. And they have a huge secret that if revealed would make humans see them as a mortal danger to humanity...
The storytelling is excellent. The first part introduces our main human characters. The Moties are alien and mysterious and you rarely get to read their thoughts and inner workings -- it's a story mostly from the human POV.
I liked this story as it is "shiny space ships with a big mystery". As the story gets to the climax the questions is whether or not human and motie can live peacefully together or if it will be war (and really with humanity having a temporary tech advantage the question is more to commit genocide or not).
Overall a gripping classic science fiction story. There was eventually a sequel, The Gripping Hand (1993), though it did not review well so I'll probably skip it. Even though The Mote in God's Eye is set in the CoDominium universe with other novels, it is very standalone and I had no trouble reading it without reading other novels.